Yeah, I did LSD, too, Sammy. But I threw away all my drawings and writings from that period in my life after I experienced the living God on a perfectly drug-free day and spent the next six years intensely searching for answers to who this God truly was. And he showed up again and again, as plainly as the stupidity on your face. (I see you.)

This search brought me into a monastery and into a degree of contemplation that demanded the purest mind and body I could muster.

It seems polluting yourself with drugs, and steering your children in that direction, is your answer to living a profound life.

Any time you wish to debate me, someone who has actually met God in a way you have never witnessed before (you know, the St. Francis and Paul of Tarsus way), set it up. I am no religious fool. In fact, I am not religious in the least. I have an understanding and a knowledge of God given to me by God himself. It will be God, the Holy Spirit, who will come along, too. I don’t think you’ve met him on a profound level as of yet.

You and your friends like Bill Maher look to the fringes of religion to find support for your atheism and for people to debate. No wonder you only find crusty bread and over-cooked meat. Meet me in the middle and then see how firmly you can stand your ground. Who knows, you may be able to actually sell some books.

Oh, and don’t worry about my credentials, for I know you value human learning. I, too, have a philosophy degree and an advanced degree.

Yeah, I did LSD, too, Sammy. But I threw away all my drawings and writings from that period in my life after I experienced the living God on a perfectly drug-free day and spent the next six years intensely searching for answers to who this God truly was. And he showed up again and again, as plainly as the stupidity on your face. (I see you.)

This search brought me into a monastery and into a degree of contemplation that demanded the purest mind and body I could muster.

It seems polluting yourself with drugs, and steering your children in that direction, is your answer to living a profound life.

Any time you wish to debate me, someone who has actually met God in a way you have never witnessed before (you know, the St. Francis and Paul of Tarsus way), set it up. I am no religious fool. In fact, I am not religious in the least. I have an understanding and a knowledge of God given to me by God himself. It will be God, the Holy Spirit, who will come along, too. I don’t think you’ve met him on a profound level as of yet.

You and your friends like Bill Maher look to the fringes of religion to find support for your atheism and for people to debate. No wonder you only find crusty bread and over-cooked meat. Meet me in the middle and then see how firmly you can stand your ground. Who knows, you may be able to actually sell some books.

Oh, and don’t worry about my credentials, for I know you value human learning. I, too, have a philosophy degree and an advanced degree.

Nhoj, I was very coherent. Sam Harris promotes drug use as a profound and inevitable life style. And this makes him an idiot. I, on the other hand, promote a drug-free clear mind, and claim that a living God exists and shows up from time to time. What is so fucking incoherent about this? I guess the sodomy reference from the other idiot is really coherent and true. What a bunch of fools.

Nhoj, I was very coherent. Sam Harris promotes drug use as a profound and inevitable life style. And this makes him an idiot. I, on the other hand, promote a drug-free clear mind, and claim that a living God exists and shows up from time to time. What is so fucking incoherent about this? I guess the sodomy reference from the other idiot is really coherent and true. What a bunch of fools.

It would be easy for God to dispel rumors of his absence.
I hate to tell you this, but that wasn’t God you saw.
It was an electro-chemical reaction in the brain you call yours.
If a certain area of the brain is stimulated all types of mystical experiences result.

Come onnnnnnnnn…....you don’t really believe in a big guy in the sky that is ultra-interested in everything humans do….....do you?

If this is the response that we come up with for a series of posts that we found irrelevant, or not thought-provoking, shame on us. All we have shown is that we can copy the very actions that we pretend to object against and then take it up a notch.
Now to try and pull this thread towards its intended topic, which is drug use, it’s positive or negative effects I have this to ask: As a group we tend to boast to be well grounded in scientific data, and objective facts, not mere superstition, however, the closest thing that came to scientific facts supporting Sams argument for drugs as a safe “tool” to use that doesn’t harm the brain we got basically nothing. Sam stated that some tests have shown negative damage to the brain, or more specifically effects that slow the brain down, while others have shown increased brain activity. Now, I am pretty confident that Sam is well aware that increased brain activity is anything but the same thing as healthy brain activity. I have very increased brain activity on average once a month, then I have a seizure. Vague statements like this can be very misleading, especially considering your audience may not say “Sam does drugs…. let’s follow him”, or your critics may say it sarcastically, yet whether they know it or not, they do say “let’s follow Sam”.
If I were to feel that I needed anything outside of my body to have a spiritual experience I would value that “spiritual experience” extremely low. This is my reasoning why; and I am going to put aside all personal experience as being subjective and holding little to no value on this forum. I am a narcoleptic ( this may sound as if it is going somewhere subjective but bear with me) as Sam and other people learned in neuroscience know, narcoleptics experience something called sleep-paralysis, this occurs to me when I am waking up and has been described to me as hypnagogic or predormital sleep paralysis. When it occurs upon awakening, I become aware before the REM cycle is complete, and it is called hypnopompic or postdormital. This may very well seem to be an “out of the body experience”, and from my experience, a little bit of opinion here, has far more to contribute than purchasing LSD or LSA on the street and experimenting with it. Especially after discovering what the vast majority of the psychedelic drugs are that are availble for retail in America, you should certainly be losing equal sleep at the thought of anybody valuable to you using LSD. Psilocybin, yes can easily be grown on your own under your own supervision in your closet and therefore makes it just as trustworthy as GHB, Meth, or crack. Don’t be fooled, unless suppressed there is no reason that you can not be fully in touch with the spiritual realm without the aid of marketed “helpers” like LSD. Yes God put everything on the planet for a reason, and I think some things have been placed here to expose the ignorance of others.

In terms of the “spiritual path”, “waking up” or just “figuring out who/what you really are”, I’m not sure there are any universal methods to get “there”. If there were, they would be more pervasive.

Each person’s delusion is different and hence the medicine they need is likely to be different as well. I’ve seen some methods work great for some people only to be used as an escape by others. This includes nearly every spiritual practice out there including mediation. I believe that this extends to drugs as well.

I’m directing this mainly at the OP but I"m not going to let the hardcore materialists off of the hook. My main thrust is this: if we as non-materialists are going to debate these guys we might as well employ the big guns. And frankly, as much as I respect Christianity, it is not as if making any kind of argument from a Christian dogmatic reference point will even be of the slightest utility with these guys. To engage materialists, you have to hit them where it hurts and that is with evidence. And the best evidence is from consciousness research. The best evidence in consciousness research is obtained in using psychedelic substances, because it is clinically based under the supervision of researchers like Stanislav Grof. There is a powerfully persuasive history of severe mental disturbances in participants being remedied entirely through psychological treatment in conjunction with powerful mental amplifiers like LSD-25.

Lets put it this way. The utility of reductionist science for the remediation of severe emotional disturbances is exactly where it was 400 years ago—useless. On the other hand, experiential exploration of psychic realms with powerful mental amplifier substances has had a spectacular history of success over the last 75 years. But here is the catch for you materialists: None of the researchers, medical personnel, participants, or patients come through a committed experience of this program without jettisoning materialism. You look at all of the big names in this project: Grof, Andrew Weil, Gordon Wasson and especially the discoverer of LSD-25, Albert Hoffman—none of these guys could resist the inevitable tossing of scientific materialism out the window. Stan Grof describes in his books the very difficult time he had when his materialistic mind frame was being systematically demolished by what his subject/patients experienced in addition to his own therapeutic employment of LSD-25. I bet you materialists have no clue what the 25 means in the previous. For now I will tell you that Hoffman only made his discovery after a magnificent series of serendipitous events which led him to the discovery, and the number 25 was key to this sequence of events. And in his writings is shown his confidence that he was led by an independent intelligence to the discovery.

I am willing to continue to lay it all out for you guys, but I want to address the OP if he is still around. You should be thankful for psychedelics. Much of the related literature supports the brilliance of some of the core themes of Christianity, BUT not the DOGMA. My family hired a woman to care for my dying father while he was in the nursing home. She was obese and a member of my sister’s evangelical community. After Dad’s passing the facility hired her, but being obese and continuing to gain, they had to let her go. This middle-aged woman, an evangelical, cannot work, and cannot climb stairs to the church, and is a hoarder. This evangelical woman did the best she could within that religious framework and her life is in dire jeopardy. In short, she needs therapy with powerful mental amplifier adjuncts. Psychedelic probing of her deep issues would be a blessing for her but the ideas you espouse above are typical and are what keep Christians from the emotional help they need. My evangelical brother-in-law and I are now in intense debate over this.